Kings of the Sea

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by Van Every Frost, Joan


  The quick twilight of the tropics was setting in and the light in the room had grown dim. Thinking that he had no more to say, she got up and faced for a moment the full-length mirror with its slightly wavy glass. He stepped up behind her and put his hands on her breasts as he watched the mirror over her shoulder. In the imperfect glass their bodies shone luminous against the dusk that seemed to coil in the room like smoke. Still watching her in the mirror, he lowered one hand between her legs, heard her gasp, and saw her eyes go blind as she threw her hips forward. He entered her from behind, his hands on her hips, and was still looking at her, all of her, and at her and him together and at what he was doing, and he saw that she was looking now too. Their eyes locked, and they stared at each other helplessly as if they were drowning, climaxing in great shuddering gasps while looking into each other’s very souls through the darkening shimmer of the mirror glass.

  Afterward he turned her to him and pulled her against his body, struck as always by the smallness of her bones. “I won’t let you go,” he said huskily and buried his face in her neck, her long hair falling over him like a curtain in the last of the dying light.

  It was only two days later that orders came through for him to report to a Major Burns, chief health officer for the district of Manila. He spent the rest of the day finishing up his reports to be forwarded to General Otis in Manila. The rains had begun, and the American advance was effectively stopped until the dry season began in October. The war, which had gone so badly for the insurgents that they had sued for a conditional peace after their headquarters in Calumpit was captured, now turned the other way.

  The Americans were mired in the mud pie that made up the low central plain and the valley floors on Luzon, for they could move no artillery and were hard enough put to it to move themselves. The insurgents, who had turned into a disorganized rabble after Calumpit, now began to make hit-and-run raids all up and down the line between Manila and Calumpit, and the Americans seemed helpless to stop them. Where sunstroke had felled the Americans in their heavy uniforms all through the furnace of spring, now it was typhoid and dysentery and the small but wicked surprise encounters with the enemy.

  David rode morosely with a train of sick and wounded bound for Manila. These days it was suicide for a man to ride by himself; there were guerrilla ambushes waiting, it seemed, in every thicket of bamboo, every stand of cogon grass. His parting from Valerie had been a painful one, not helped by Luce’s telling him that one day David would thank him. Valerie had put up a show of gaiety and assured him that by the time (not if) he returned, he would find her back in a house on the plantation. With the rains had returned most of her workers, for food was short in the rebel camp and actions were confined to hit-and-run raids that were proving far more effective than the costly stands at Malabon and Calumpit.

  The major to whom David was to report in Manila greeted him with documents raising him to a full lieutenant. David thought of Stephen’s prediction on the Trevelyan a thousand years ago. Burns toned out to be a small cheerful man with bright-blue eyes and a flaming red handlebar mustache. David’s puzzlement over being ordered to report to a medical officer disappeared when Burns dropped into colloquial Spanish and explained that his position in the hospital made a perfect cover for overseeing a spy network he had singlehandedly set up on Luzon, covering the country south of Manila as well as to the north.

  “I’ve had the devil’s own time finding someone I can trust who knows Tagalog. Thank God you happened along.”

  “Why couldn’t you use Filipino interpreters?”

  “We used to, but too many of them turned out to be insurgent spies, and goodbye informers. Understandably, they got so that they wouldn’t report to a Filipino, even a Macabebe.”

  “Macabebe?”

  “Yes. The Spaniards, they say, a long time ago imported Indians from Mexico and California to the Philippines because they could trust them. These Indians interbred with Filipinos, and to all intents and purposes after all these generations they are Filipinos, but they still hold themselves apart. Their loyalty has always been to the Spaniards and now to us. You’ll be seeing more of them in the north from now on.”

  “You could limit your spies to those who speak Spanish.”

  “That’s what we’ve had to do, but most farmers don’t speak Spanish. They’re the ones we count on, because the insurgents in many cases have forcibly stripped their fields and taken their farm animals. I have a smattering of Tagalong but not enough to conduct an interrogation.”

  Unbidden the memory came to David how he and Valerie would sometimes playfully make love in Tagalog, a simple language that used homey images like little rooster and nesting bird. What was she doing now? Did she miss him?

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said to Burns. “There are some I understand better than others — it depends on what part they come from and how clearly they pronounce their words.”

  When David wasn’t wanted to speak to an informer, he spent his time at the hospital writing letters for men, reading out loud, running errands, and generally making himself useful.

  “We’ve got a few of your navy men on the critical list,” Burns told him one day. “If they weren’t critical they’d still be on the hospital ship. Maybe you could cheer them up a bit. They had a nasty outbreak of bacillary dysentery on the ships, and they finally had to hand us eighteen of the worst ones.”

  The navy men had been put in a small ward by themselves, and a sad-looking group they were. They were now too weak to get up, and the Filipino ward boys were kept busy running bedpans. Now and then a man would groan or even scream with cramps, and all of them had lost so much weight that they seemed like little more than skeletons, the flesh burned right off their bones. One of the men told him that there were also a couple of officers in the room across the hall, and when David had done what he could in the ward he knocked on the room door.

  A Filipino opened the door and gestured him in. One of the men was sitting up and looked as if he might be past the worst of it, and the other was turned toward the wall.

  “Who are you?” the man sitting up asked him curiously.

  David could see why, because though obviously an Anglo-Saxon, he was dressed as a Filipino civilian.

  “I’m a naval lieutenant seconded by Admiral Dewey to the military administration here in Manila because I know some Tagalog. The people speak to me more readily when I’m out of uniform.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Commander Burke of the Monadnock. My roommate there is Lieutenant Nye of the Raleigh.”

  “Nye! Stephen Nye?”

  “You know him?”

  “Very well, commander. We went to Annapolis together. Is he very ill, then?”

  Burke only shook his head silently, and David felt a chill slice through him.

  Suddenly the figure in the other bed stirred and turned over, revealing a being so changed that David would have had trouble recognizing him. “Double,” the mouth with its painfully cracked lips called out hoarsely. “Double, hurry up! We’ve still got to dress for the Gilbeys’. Wear the green, it becomes you …” His voice died to an indistinguishable murmur.

  David was shocked. “How long has he been like that?”

  “He’s been getting worse the two weeks we’ve been here. There doesn’t seem to be anything they can do. They keep pouring liquid down him, sometimes forcibly, and it just goes right through him.”

  David walked over to the muttering creature in the other bed and put his hand on the bony brow that burned with an incandescent heat. “Stephen — Stephen, can you hear me? It’s David.”

  Stephen’s eyes opened. “David!” he said quite clearly. “It is David, isn’t it? Tell Double I can’t see her until tomorrow, will you? I’ve got the duty tonight.”

  “I’ll tell her, Stephen,” David replied helplessly. “Rest now.”

  “Don’t forget, David. She’ll be waiting for me otherwise.” The hoarse voice was anxious.

  “I won’t,” David promise
d. To Burke he said, “Where can I find his doctor?”

  “I can’t help you,” Burke replied. “Ask one of the orderlies. We’ve already lost some thirty men to whatever this is, and there’ll be more before it’s over. Worse than the Spanish and the insurgents put together.”

  At last David managed to track down Stephen’s doctor, a thin, harried, balding man who didn’t look too well himself.

  “Which one?” he asked disinterestedly. “There are two of them in there.”

  “The sick one.”

  The doctor stopped walking down the hall then and really looked at David for the first time. “You a friend of his?”

  “We went to Annapolis together. He’s married to my sister.”

  The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell to tell you except that he’ll probably die. They come to a kind of point of no return, and those who pass it seldom survive.”

  “Isn’t there anything anyone can do for them?”

  “Believe me, if there were we’d be doing it. I might as well be a witch doctor for all any of my training has to do with these tropical diseases. There are men in here with things that no one has even described before. Their skin rots, they shit their insides out, they burn up with fevers we never identify. This has got to be one of the pestholes of the world. If the insurgents can only hold out long enough, we’ll all die and leave them to it.” He put a hand on David’s arm. “I’m sorry, but I think you’d want the truth. He’s as good as dead now.”

  David closed his eyes for a moment. He had really known it the minute he had seen the skull-like face with its dead eyes and yellow parchment skin, but he wanted the doctor to produce a miracle. He saw Stephen running down the rugby field laughing. He feinted neatly and dodged an opposing player, then gracefully dropkicked the blunt oval ball over the goal post. Oh God, he would have to be the one to tell Double, he thought. At one time that wouldn’t have bothered him nearly so much, but now he knew something of what he would feel if Valerie were to die, and he found himself close to tears. Poor Double, to have captured that elusive splendor and then to lose it in so unforeseen a fashion.

  That evening he reluctantly made his way upstairs in the hospital to look in on Stephen. He opened the door softly and at first couldn’t take in what he saw. Burke was asleep and snoring gently, but Stephen’s bed was empty, the covers tucked in neatly, unmussed sheets and pillowcase gleaming white and unused. Stephen had died, that was clear, but he asked one of the floor orderlies to be sure.

  The man looked at him with curiosity; he must have seemed distraught. “Yep. Went around four in the afternoon. Funny, most of them die in the small hours of the morning. He’s better off, poor devil.”

  “Dearest Double,” David wrote later, “I don’t know how to tell you this, though you may have heard through the Navy Department already.” He knew that the Navy Department in cases like this always merely said that the man had given his life for his country, and more often than not the commanding officers who had to write the follow-up letters of condolence simply made up plausible circumstances of death that would sound better than saying that the man died drowning in his own excrement because of a war that should never have been. He went on to tell her how much the men had liked him, that he had been with him when he died, and that Stephen’s last words were to tell her to be brave and that he loved her. “He also said,” David added, “that one day he wanted you to marry again and to have the children you and he never had.”

  He laid his head on his arms then and ached for Stephen and Double both, yes and for himself and Valerie, too. God knew he needed her now to exorcise the grief and pain that had brought him past the edge of tears for the first time since he was a child.

  Chapter VI

  The war dragged on through the rainy season. Aguinaldo’s offers of conditional peace came to nothing, since the only terms Otis would consider consisted of complete and unconditional surrender, which Aguinaldo could not bring himself to accept. Even though the guerrillas were giving the Americans fits as they had the Spanish earlier, Aguinaldo was hard pressed, his forces melting out from under him all the time as more and more returned to their farms and families.

  Harassed, suspicious, afraid, Aguinaldo was having to watch his army disintegrate even as they had found the means to carry the war to the Americans. By October he was disbanding them himself because they could no longer be fed. The roving parties of guerrillas were no longer under any real control of his, and they often spent more time looting and killing their own countrymen than they did harassing the Americans. Meanwhile the Americans, who had started out so cocky and confident, saw that they were dying in a war it seemed no one could win. Because the guerrillas concealed themselves among the civilian population, the Americans on occasion dealt savagely with villages suspected of harboring the enemy, and columns of smoke and the now familiar loud reports of bamboo exploding in the flames became as common a part of the country scene as the rice paddies and the cane fields.

  In September of 1899 it had been almost three months since David had seen Valerie. One day at the hospital word came that Admiral Dewey wished to see him. He got out his moldy uniform and had it washed and pressed as best the hospital laundry could manage.

  “First of all, I wanted to tell you, David, that you have done a splendid job, so splendid in fact that the army very much wants to keep you.”

  David started to say something, but the admiral stopped him with a gesture.

  “I told them you had a wife and children and that you had been out here since the very beginning, that it was up to you to say whether you wanted to stay longer or not. They are already beginning to send their volunteers home, I reminded them, and I didn’t see why you shouldn’t have the same chance. If you do wish to leave, you will do so as my personal aide.”

  “Thank you, sir, I appreciate your offer, but if it’s all the same to you, I would like to stay. There is unfinished business I would like to take care of.” Valerie passed across his mind.

  The admiral’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Indeed? Well, I must commend your devotion to duty even if not your common sense. I don’t know how you stand working for the army. My successor will be Admiral Remey, and I have left instructions that any time you wish to be relieved, you are to be sent wherever your family is for leave before reassignment.” He shook hands solemnly with David. “The best of luck to you, lad. Between you and me, I’m glad to be out of it. It’s a dirty war, a dirtier war than any of us intended.”

  “Yes sir.” David thought of the smoking ruins of the plantation house with its cargo of incinerated wounded, of the church at Paco and the terrified refugees inside demolished by the merciless naval bombardment, of the hundreds and hundreds of burning villages across Luzon.

  With the dispersal of the organized insurgent army began a different phase of the war. The Filipinos returned to their homes, but gathered into small bands for the purpose of attacking the Americans wherever they found them. The Americans, with their heavy clothes and hardtack-and-bacon field rations, far from being able to pursue the guerrillas after a hit instead were hard put to it even to stay on their feet. More were lost to heat prostration and sunstroke than to guerrilla bullets. During the wet season the Filipinos seemed hardly discomfited while the Americans slipped and bogged and swore, their pack mules and they themselves helpless in the morass that every trail, every stream crossing, every ravine and slope and valley in the torrential rains became.

  During all of that time David had seen Valerie exactly twice. Once she had come to Manila for hardware and other wants for the house under construction, and she had sought him out in the hospital.

  “You’ve seen the insurgent side of it,” David told her grimly, “now look at the other side,” and he took her through the wards.

  “There are so many more sick than wounded,” she said in wonder.

  “The country is licking us when the guerrillas can’t. We were never meant to live, let alone fight, in the heat and fevers of
a place like this.”

  Later he showed her his room, little more than a closet really, but he was lucky to have it to himself. She reached behind her and pulled the door to, calmly shooting the bolt. Then they were in each other’s arms, clinging hungrily, their bodies straining against each other.

  “There hasn’t been a waking hour I’ve spent without thinking of you, wondering what you were doing, wondering if you missed me, wondering to whom the little rooster was crowing since I wasn’t there.”

  “The little rooster hasn’t been crowing at all,” he answered huskily, “but he’s about to now.”

  Later as they lay spent and crowded together on his narrow hospital cot, she asked, “Won’t they be looking for you?”

  He laughed. “One nice thing about what I’m doing is that there are no hours. When there are prisoners to be interrogated or informers to hear out, I work sometimes for fourteen, sixteen hours at a time. In between, I loaf. The trouble is, I never know when I’ll be wanted, and that makes it hard to take off for Malolos.”

  “I noticed signs of your loafing,” she commented dryly. “Why then were so many men in beds out there asking you to get things for them, see people for them, write their letters for them? Don’t tell me they only today thought up all those requests to make of a stranger?”

  He dismissed it. “Helps pass the time, that’s all. I don’t want to talk about them, I want to talk about you, about us. Val, I can’t go on like this, never seeing you, walking around all the time in a fog of desire and longing. We can’t go on like this.”

 

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